I’m trying to reconnect with inspiration after a long dull winter. I’m mostly old and weary after four years of world holocaust, and partly distracted by “hurry up and wait” dealings with my courseware publisher. The project is all done now, so I no longer have to keep my mental desk clear for sudden final hurryups.
My source of inspiration is the beacon of the universe itself, as observed by the old Islamic astrometeorologists. And the point of connection is the alidade. When lenses replaced alidades, a larger quantity of observations were possible, but the quality of two-way connection to God’s will was lost.
Last year when I was showing the old Maragha and Brahe instruments, I was initially puzzled by the lack of lenses. Glassblowing was already ancient in 1500, and the bottom of a bottle was a lens. Surely those expert instrument makers must have thought about bottles, or looked through the bottom of a bottle. Why didn’t they replace alidades by lenses? I concluded that they wanted direct vision, so they stayed with alidades.
Typically we regard eyes and ears and cameras and microphones as transducers. Our senses are transponders, not transducers. The brain receives and resonates and MODIFIES the overall wave pattern of the universe. Its own momentarily tuned resonances influence the overall pattern in a minuscule way, just as the momentary tuned resonance of one guitar influences the overall sound patterns in the room. This influence may well be an active radiation of waves. Other animals and plants actively radiate waves. Plants send out electrostatic fields, fish send actual radio waves. An antenna-like structure in our cerebellum is strongly suggestive.
But even without active radiation, our IMPEDANCE can affect the shape of the universe’s wave structure, by absorbing or ignoring various frequencies. Our mental activity and attention PHYSICALLY changes our impedance, along with generating waves that can add or cancel the ambient waves. If we are sucking in one frequency, the universe’s harmony is deprived of that frequency near us.
Direct perception is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT FOR SURVIVAL in all of our senses. 2020 broke our direct connection to the microbes in the air. Our immune system is no longer allowed to ACTIVELY DEAL WITH MICROBES in an undistorted way. Its perception is distorted and recycled by muzzles and Lucite and distancing, and the direct alidade of the nostril is replaced by the digital lens of the “vaccines” that aren’t real vaccines.
We have the infinite gift of life and beauty.
USE IT OR LOSE IT.
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Earlier I believed the transition from alidades to lenses was sudden. Maybe it wasn’t quite so sharp.
I ran across a midpoint between alidades and lenses. It’s an equatorial scope built by the brilliantly aptronymous Christoph Scheiner in 1611. He used both alidades and lenses to create a projection of the sun, and then wrote a book carefully documenting and drawing sunspots at various seasons and times.
Scheiner wasn’t the first to build an equatorial, but he seems to have been the first to use Galileo’s two lenses in a controlled way, with azimuth and altitude variables. Galileo’s scope was simply mounted on a gimbal.
From a history of astronomy:
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Galileo was more concerned with the optical qualities of his telescopes than with
their mountings, which probably consisted of upright poles or tripod stands fitted
with a small universal joint and cradle. Scheiner’s helioscope was a distinct
improvement, in theory if not in use, on Galileo’s stands. Scheiner made use of the
idea of Tycho’s polar axis, using it to carry a telescope in a frame fixed to the top of the axis. The lower end carried a circle graduated into twenty-four hour
divisions. Once he had pointed the tube to the sun he had only to turn the polar
axis at a slow and constant rate to follow the disk across the sky. The instrument
constituted, in an elementary way, an equatorial telescope.
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Tycho’s equatorial used only alidades:
Tycho had money and could afford elegant metalworkers. Scheiner seemed to be making his own instruments with simple handtools.
Here’s my previous description of equatorials:
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The coudé was specialized from a more general Equatorial. The Equatorial reaches all parts of the sky in a peculiar way, unlike the more ordinary and understandable Altitude and Azimuth system. Here we run the Equatorial through all of its gyrations, with Happystar desperately trying to hold on and observe.
The coudé runs through the same pattern, reaching all angles of the sky, but it’s bent (coudé) in the middle with two mirrors. The bend enables the eyepiece to remain in one place, so it can pass through a single weatherstripped hole in a wall without needing a rotating dome or a retractable cover. The astronomer can stay in one chair, comfortably heated or cooled, unhassled by birds or bugs, while the business end of the scope remains outside with no thermal differences to distort the air.
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The equatorial has a special advantage for sun-tracking. After you adjust the altitude for the day and location, you can follow the sun by turning only the azimuth. With the straightforward gimbal you have to adjust both variables all the time.
Scheiner’s diagram of his equatorial:
My version, located in the Brahe observatory for proper context:
Viewing an eclipse by projection: [I had to fatten up the scope for this to get an image at all, given Poser’s limited handling of refraction.]
View through the alidade:
View through the telescope: (Poser doesn’t do refraction properly.)
Changing the altitude for the day of the year:
Changing the azimuth for the hour and minute:
One of Scheiner’s sunspot diagrams, drawn from what he saw on the chart-holder:
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Continued in part 2.
Polistra's Mill 